It's an old story: when Bungie releases a new system for the long game in Destiny 2, players find a way to abuse the game's rules to instantly "complete" the game. It has happened before, and it happened again this time.

This time, cheezons are turning their attention to the new "Commendation" system introduced in last week's "Lightfall" expansion. Complete an activity with a group of players and give small awards to those who did well on the exit screen. The total rewards you receive will be collected on a new awards page, with scores attached.

It's all very innocuous, except for Bungie's decision to tie other forms of progression to commendations. Clan vendor Hawthorne offers a pinnacle reward for giving 20 accolades. On a more related note, Bungie has also tied its new Guardian Rank system to commendations. To increase one's rank, one must not only increase one's commendation score, but at higher levels, one must earn a certain number of commendations in a particular category.

On the bungie side, the Guardian Rank is designed as a summary of a player's experience and investment at a glance. It is not something that you have to go to the trouble to rank up, but rather to let other players know that if you are at a relatively high rank, you probably know what you are doing. However, Destiny players have never encountered a progression system that didn't want to be the best: this led to the following question. 'What is the most efficient way to quickly earn many accolades scores?'

The answer is the raid "Last Wish," which appeared in the Destiny 2 expansion "Forsaken" in 2018. The trick here is that every time you "finish" an activity, the end-of-activity commendation screen pops up. This means that it also shows up if the team fails an activity that kicks into orbit when they wipe, such as Wellspring on Master difficulty; one way to load into Wellspring, wipe, and hand the commendation to the other losers on the team is to wipe, but it's definitely not the fastest way.

A unique feature of Last Wish is a grid called Wishwall. The most common use is to teleport directly to a specific boss, but it can also be used to activate a special challenge mode for raids called Petra's Run. This can also be used to award players, and since it is from a raid, each one will have a higher award score.

Time consuming is simply how long it takes to shoot code into a 5x4 grid, but even that is avoided thanks to the already existing community macro for wishwalls.

When I checked the Destiny 2 LFG Discord yesterday, the Last Wish LFG page was already flooded with requests to bring macros to help farm commendations.

After all, there is nothing to be gained here - the Guardian rank brings no material rewards. However, it can change perceptions of the relevant skills and knowledge of higher-level players. Indeed, if I see a level 10 or 11 player in the next few weeks, I will assume they have spent hours throwing themselves off a cliff for influence.

Macros tend to fall into a gray area when it comes to live service games; in 2020, a post on the Bungie forums by the security team said: "Automation of trivial tasks (especially for accessibility) is allowed. Only if it avoids challenges that all players face during gameplay (auto-aim, trigger bots, etc.) will they be penalized for automation". Assuming this is still true, this is not contrary to the letter of the law.

Last Wish remains the all-around raid for those aiming for grind, and the second encounter, Shuro Chi, is also one of the best spots to get kills to earn crafted weapon levels. It is no wonder that in the years since this raid was released, no other raid has featured anything similar to Wish Wall.

Despite the campaign's many critics and mostly negative Steam review ratings, the backlash against Lightfall seems to have eased in recent days. Players are starting to tackle post-campaign missions, begin season quests, and become familiar with the new Strand subclass.